


looking too closely

by warmth



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst, Happy Ending, M/M, Soul Bond
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-28
Updated: 2014-12-28
Packaged: 2018-03-04 01:41:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,291
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2904629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/warmth/pseuds/warmth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He doesn’t know how to express that he’s grateful, so he says, “You know you have to kill me.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	looking too closely

**Author's Note:**

> set in some nebulous realm between canon compliant and completely out of this world where I cobbled together the pieces I liked and listened to a lot of glo-fi on 8tracks. there's a good amount of heart in it, though. please be kind. 
> 
> you can find me at marriedsterek on tumblr. ❤

It happens for the first time when Derek’s sixteen and about as sure as a newborn baby. But a girl is dying and he’s in love with her so he says, “The pain. I can - I mean, I know how to help with the pain.”

He closes his eyes and his fingers slip in her blood.

When he opens them again, Peter says, “You have to kill her.” Pauses, and then smiles, serene. Or, as serene as someone like Peter can be. “That’s how it works.”

“Get out of here.”

“You have no idea what you’re doing. You don’t even know how to find her.”

Derek snarls, if only to get his head straight. Everything is white the way they always say, and in that moment, he’s more afraid of death than he’s ever been. You have to kill her. Her body, a pale black bird, and her mouth, saying, _Derek, Der_. Still, in that white room. The door, closing behind him. Peter doesn’t disappear. You have to kill her. Hurry up, or I’ll do it for you.

Hot breath in his throat, stifling, a cork in a wine bottle. Derek feels his lungs go wet. In a moment of weakness, he looks back, and Peter’s eyes are green.

“Go on.”

He closes his eyes, holding her down with a hand at her hip, trying to be gentle. Derek whispers her name. She trusts him so much that she doesn’t struggle. Her neck beneath his hands, broken.

It doesn’t save her life.  

“Vulnerability,” his mother tells him later, far later, after he’s crumpled up and cried and she’s allowed to be angry with him, “Sometimes death. Not always. _That’s_ how it works.”

-

The berserker gets a hand inside his body and he thinks, _that’s how it works_.

“Derek,” Stiles says.

He gurgles, blood in his mouth, they say you can swallow a pint of your own blood before you get sick, or Fight Club says, at least. Derek smiles a little to himself, then closes his eyes.

“Derek,” Stiles repeats. His hand is warm and dry against his neck, squeezing worried. “If you die I’m gonna kick your ass.”

“As - ” Derek manages before he passes out.

The room, white as he remembers, but less scary. And Peter, haunting him always, says, “It works both ways.”

He picks himself up and presses a hand to his stomach, like it’ll stop the bleeding. His arms twist up, painful and aching, but he can finally breathe, so he thinks it means maybe he’s getting closer to dying the less he feels. Peter rolls his eyes and pinches him.

“Are you listening to me?”

“Would you just let me die in peace,” Derek replies, voice dry, peeling himself out of the jacket.

Peter says, “You get one of those kids to kill you.”

“Why don’t you just do it?”  

His lips twist up in a way that never fails to make him uneasy, “You and I both know I’m the last person you want to be bonded to.”

Derek bristles, but doesn’t disagree, and he leaves him there. Better off without that, after he saw what having Peter at his shoulder worked itself out to. He thinks of Scott. He thinks of himself at sixteen. He thinks of Kate’s teeth and her hand around his wrist, dragging it across her own throat.

“Your mind’s a little twisted, huh,” Stiles tells him, breaking those thoughts off at the stem. He runs a hand along an empty wall. The world quiets.

“What are you doing here?” Derek asks, stopping. The pain in his gut burns like a belly full of hot coals.

“I’m your emergency responder. Or something.”

He doesn’t know how to express that he’s grateful, so he says, “You know you have to kill me.”

Stiles swallows and wrings his wrists. Laughs a little shakily. “Figures that’s what you would think.”

Derek gives him a confused look, watches him pacing, dark eyed and too pretty for a room where a lot of dreams have died. Stiles motions him over, says, “You have a favorite song?”

Derek thinks of technicolor and his sister’s soda cans all lined up like bowling pins, some kind of happiness that comes with youth, says, “I don’t know,” and then he thinks of his mother’s wedding day and her old CDs and he tilts his head, _my life a wreck you’re making_.

Stiles searches his face, considering, before turning to look through his phone. Five minutes and brassy old world America warbles out of his iphone speakers, tinny and familiar. Something in Derek settles, soothed.

“How did you know - that.”

“Can’t you smell the supernatural on me?” Stiles murmurs. “I’m some kind of something. Here, c’mon, this is the hard part.”

He’s holding out a hand and Derek starts to figure out what’s going on. Frank sings, _I spend my days in longing, and wondering why it’s me you’re wronging_. Derek’s voice is flat, “I’m dying.”

“Yeah, and I’m saving your ass. Would you just - ” Stiles takes his hand, drags him close, too close, their noses colliding hard. Stiles’ breath is rapid and mint sweet, a cool touch on the inside of Derek’s neck where he’s nestled his cheek once they right themselves. Pale hands crawl up his arms, trying to avoid blood, and he swears he feels a few cuts reopen.

“Look, see,” Stiles says, swaying them gentle around the room, cautious, “Not so bad.”

“No.” Derek grunts, lung punctured. His exhales go wet. Stiles tightens his grip, fingers scratching lightly at the nape of his neck, a small comfort, a sweet off key humming in his ear.  

Vulnerability, Derek thinks. Slides his hands along the small of Stiles’ back, gasping, hand fisted in his t-shirt. _I’m all for you, body and soul_.

Soft and drowsy, Stiles holding him in his glory, Stiles at his best, Stiles at his worst, Stiles looking up at him with eyes like a film reel, that white room where everyone goes to die. Derek spits up blood with a weak mouth. _You know I’m yours for the taking_. The music moves on without them.

-

“Derek, what the fuck,” Stiles says when he wakes up. His voice cracks. Derek lets go of his hand.

He’s small in the hospital gown, smaller, and he keeps his eyes open. There’s an IV line threaded in under his skin. Derek blinks, looks down at his hands, looks at the fluid in the bag, looks at the empty coffee cup on the bedside table. Anything to avoid Stiles’ face.

He's been hospitalized for about a day, maybe two, passed out for more hours than not. Derek remembers his hands cupping Stiles’ fragile, jalopy body. (This is the price tag on Derek’s life.) His chest puffed and burned like a crematorium. “He’ll be alright,” the doctor had said, and Derek thought, _oh thank god_ , then he stopped thinking.

He shakes his head, says, “The others wanted.” Cuts himself off.

“To stay, yeah, I know, I get that, school, real life,” Stiles says back, picks at his nails with a small grimace. “This isn’t my first rodeo show. What I want to know is why you’re still,” he swallows. Derek watches his adam’s apple surface and recede, the shallow movement in his shoulders, “You’re still here, is all.”

“Mm. Melissa threatened me.”

Stiles laughs like a firecracker going off, but his face closes up and Derek thinks, you saved my life, but he doesn’t say it, doesn’t know how to make this any easier for either of them.

“Serves you right, fucker.”

The morphine is making Stiles’ body soft, a gangling tender he never has anymore. Silence filters in like radio static. Derek toys with his own fingers and listens to the boy’s breathing. Even now, he can feel Stiles’ heart in his own, the shadow of a pulse that doesn't really belong.

“Stiles.” Derek says, and maybe Stiles can hear something in his voice, something worth getting scared of, because he closes his eyes when replies, “We, uh. We’re cool. We don’t have to talk about it.”

Kate had said something like that a long time ago, hands steady under his shirt, and there were a lot of things he didn’t feel that he does now. He thinks of Kate’s promises and his blue eyes and the crown of her head stained with blood under his mouth. The ghost of her makes him sick to his stomach.

He’s only eighteen, Derek thinks, but Stiles has these big hands and a slack mouth in his sleep and he wants so much it scares him so slips out of the room, into the hallway. Derek covers his face with his hands and breathes in antiseptic, blood, salty wet tears, until it clears everything else away.

-

That night he dreams of Stiles in a black suit, crisp as a new winter. Everything is flushed pink sweet and there's a breeze out, nipping cold. Stiles slides his hands into his pockets. Derek doesn’t breathe, wiggles his bare toes. The courthouse lawn is overgrown.

"Hey." Stiles says. His shirt is pushed open, bone white skin around the stretch of his sternum.

“You said this was an emergency.” Derek pants. There’s sweat pooling at the small of his back, through his sleep shirt and he tries to muster up a little anger.

Stiles just smiles, older and broader and more confident in all the ways Derek didn’t know he still wanted. And, god, the wanting. He digs a shoe into the grass, playing bashful, and his voice goes low when he speaks again, pitched something happy, “I don’t know, I think proposing is kinda like an emergency, don’t you?”  

-

He’s only eighteen, Derek thinks, and that’s all there is.

-

The dreams don’t stop coming though, no matter how many times he listens to the three messages Stiles leaves on his voice mail and then nothing. He thinks of Scott frowning every time he sends a can’t make it text, like maybe he’s disappointed. Lydia hasn’t sought him out yet, but it’s coming, he knows it’s coming. He takes what little solitude he has before, inevitably, everything crumbles around him like burnt paper.

“Derek,” Dream Stiles says one night. Smiles into his neck, pressed right into the groove of his throat, murmuring sweet nothings. He punctuates the words with his teeth, runs his fingers over Derek’s hairline. “Der.”

“I’m here.” Derek says, and it’s enough.

-

“He slow danced you back to health,” Cora says over the line, after he's woken up empty, after his gut stops clenching. Her voice fades in and out, incredulous, then not there at all. “Are you joking.”

He keeps silent. She sighs, almost tangible, like she’s breathing her disappointment right onto his face.

She says, “I don’t know what that means, Derek.”

“Okay. Thanks.” That’s as far as he’ll look into it, is all he tries to convince himself. There’s nothing else for the night. “Tell me about Argentina.”

-

“You still smell like him,” Lydia says. She curls her feet up under her thighs. He looks out the window, a week of ducking behind soup cans to avoid them and then her, coming to his door with her hair braided, taking over his couch, his stove. It’s raining, cold and thundering and Derek’s mind wanders to warm skin under his before he can stop himself.

It’s not really an answer, but he says, “I’m twenty-four.”

Lydia doesn’t look disappointed, but her voice is flat. “Astute.” Then, “Scott says you do, too. Says it’s weird.”  

“Scott’s a romantic.” Scott doesn’t get how this really works, he doesn’t say, even though he has Allison, always has Allison even when he’s not allowed to.

“He didn’t kill you,” She says. It sounds like an accusation. Derek thinks of Jackson and his pale shaking body and his arms around her waist, wonders again over how alike they are, Derek and Lydia, in all the ways that matter.

His hands shake, and he thinks, it’s getting worse, being away.  

“No.”

Lydia laughs in a sad kind of way and drinks her tea and he lets her stay the afternoon commandeering his tv because she knows even he has his limits to how badly someone can hurt him.

-

He dreams of a swimming pool with red water and Stiles’ naked back. There’s a line of bruises down his neck, between his shoulders, a parting line. All the shape of Derek’s mouth. Blue, Derek thinks, and he wants to touch. He steps back instead.

“It’s okay if you don’t want me,” Stiles says. His voice is a closed fist, but it isn’t angry. He says, “but you shouldn’t hurt yourself.”

Derek closes his eyes, tells him, “I’m not _allowed_ to want you.” and maybe it isn’t enough after all.

-

There’s a fruit basket waiting for him in the morning, and some Tylenol.

“Werewolf kind, too,” Kira tells him with a happy smile. Jackson gives him a bored look. His hands are loose in the pockets of his jeans.

“You look kind of terrible.” Jackson says, lip curled back.

Derek snarls at him. Despite the puffy red around his eyes, the sound still rattles something in that one. The apples in the fruit baskets are dimpled. He stares at them for a long while, rubbing at the raw of his nose and leaving the two of them to shuffle awkwardly in his foyer.

Kira says, “We, uh, heard about Stiles.”

“I’m going to go take a nap.” Derek’s voice is pained. “Thank you for the - thanks.”

Jackson steers her out of the apartment before she can keep on and he’s never really been so grateful.

-

They fight in this one.

“I could hate you,” Dream Stiles spits, his eyes are raving, his eyes are a sit in, Derek’s skin is cold. “I've got all the reasons to hate you. You don’t know shit about me, you don’t know how to be happy, you fucking - ” his voice breaks off like a bone fracture.

The anger’s gone out of him, out of both of them. Derek sits down on the couch. Stiles’ body is a crease on the coffee table. His legs are still. It’s been an hour, maybe two, and their throats are raw.

“I know,” Derek whispers. He looks down into his lap at Stiles’ empty jacket, buries his hands in the limp pockets, “I.”

“Fuck, Derek,” Stiles says, reaching out. There’s something tentative there, something careful and gentle and reverent. He sighs, content and exhausted, lets Stiles lean forward until their foreheads bump together, until he can rub his nose in behind the curve of his jaw. “ _I_ know. I’m - ”

Derek says, “Shh. It’s okay. We’re okay. Don’t apologize.” and maybe they don’t fight in this one at all.  

-

He wakes up with a broken fever and someone knocking on the door. The skin on his palms is split and healing, but slowly - slowly. Punctured in his sleep. Derek thinks about spilled blood that makes bonds strong and his fingernails, bitten down to the root a lot like someone else he knows.

"Open the fucking door, Lon Chaney, or I swear to god, I’ll - uh.” Stiles’ voice fades off into embarrassed mumbling as he pulls the door back.

He’s a squared off shadow against the hallway lights. Derek sniffs, feeling too hot, flushed all the way down to the stem of him.

“What do you want.” He makes his voice harsh, harsher than the crooning in his chest that’s warmed by Stiles’ presence, his talking heart, his lullaby lung.  

And he’s never gotten this far with anybody else before. There’s parts of him surfacing that he hasn’t seen in years. He wants to bury his face in the soft place behind Stiles’ ear. He wants to slide his hands up under the scratch of a dumb zombie t-shirt.

Stiles says, “I get that your whole niche right now is avoiding the problem until it blows up and tries to get one of us eaten, but I can’t sleep.”

“What else is new.” Derek says, looking at Stiles’ hands and his overnight bag and the dark under his eyes so reminiscent of a monster that wore his face. The thought makes both of them quiet. Derek lets out a gusty breath and leaves the door open. “You can have the bed.”

“I read online that,” Stiles begins and stops. He runs a hand through his hair, loping inside like something canine, like something that could pin Derek, bite down on his shoulder and quiet him. The parts of him that are all his mother say, yes, and yes and yes.

Stiles tries again, says, “Our asses have been soul bonded together for two months and I haven’t so much as given you a high five, dude. That has to have some kind of consequence.”

He thinks shaking hands and a broken coffee mug and falling asleep at odds hours, how he smells like Stiles after all this time, how his moments have developed an undertone of sharp and hyper, the yearning in his gut that feels like stones dropped through his stomach, the punched out bathroom mirror, the feverish sweats.

“You didn’t choose me.” Derek says carefully. Stiles looks at him with those eyes, big waxing moons, so angry, and he feels compelled to clarify, “You saved my life because you had to.”

“I didn’t _have_ to do anything.”

He drops it though, drops everything, his chin and his bag and his anger like a puppet with its strings cut. Derek leaves him to methodically removing his shoes and goes looking for a blanket, if only to give his hands something to do. He digs around in an old closet for a while, past a couple of baseballs, old clothing, the wolf tooth necklace Laura gave him one Christmas as a gag. Bingo. White and gold leaves, quilted and light and soft.

Stiles is fiddling with his music in the living room. There are seven open CD cases, itunes shiny and white on a computer screen. Something soft he doesn’t remember so well plays staticky. Something like dancing goes on, too, small swaying movements, little fluttering rolls of Stiles' hips when he finds a tune he likes. It makes Derek’s tongue flicker against lips gone dry as a bone. His back is turned. He's wearing black socks.

“My mom liked this kind of stuff,” Stiles says. He rolls his head back against his shoulders. Derek lays the blanket over the back of the couch, pretends he wasn’t staring. “ _I_ , uh, like it. Makes me think you’re a little less robot wolf about your feelings.”

“A guy broods one time,” Derek says, because he’s trying - he’s. It’s a shitty joke.

Stiles laughs anyway though, breathy-like and empty. He’s tired, heartbeat sluggish, hands lazy, and he keeps moving. Derek watches him press buttons on his old stereo with a careful grace and swallows the funny, unfamiliar feeling at the back of his throat, “I’m gonna pour some coffee.”

He ambles into the kitchen before he speaks again, considering his words and breathing. Behind him, there’s a small rustling. He watches drops of brown liquid splash into the big pool pot. The music goes on.

“You were in the hospital,” Derek leaves the sentence bare and asking. He has a Santa mug for Stiles. The red belly pushes out to form the glass handle.  

Stiles slides up onto one of the bar stools, says, “A week. I got a slick wheelchair ride out of it, _thanks_.” There’s sweat cooled in the downy hair at his temples.

“I didn’t know that was going to happen. Sorry.”

“Bullshit. But I _do_ have a tendency to pull half our plans out of my ass, so half my fault, I guess.”

He shrugs. Derek pushes the mug across the island. Stiles lips at the rim, warms his hands with a happy sigh. He smells like grass and bitter, then old spice, sweat, relish on a hot dog.

“How long is this going to last, you think?” Stiles asks.

He puts the mug down on a hula girl coaster, traces the faded pink of her lei with the tip of his finger. Their hands are - close, and there’s a winding itch under Derek’s skin that he could quiet easily enough but his mind says, _he’s only eighteen_ , or maybe, _you’ll destroy each other if you start now_.

“I don’t know,” Derek says. “You can leave. I mean, I think there’s ways to break it.”

“Deaton would know.” He runs a hand through the mess of hair, continues, “He’s on break, figured he’d get the hell out of dodge before some psycho Christmas fairy came and used our skin as gift wrap.”

“Elaborate.”

Stiles snorts, indelicate in all the ways Derek likes about him, drains the rest of his cup, “Likely. I’m gonna check out your bedroom.” he squeezes the back of his neck as he goes and Derek keeps quiet, quiet, about the flush of content that goes through him, pushes down all his body’s instincts, says _no_. He thanks god when it listens.

-

They have a history, is the problem. They have lots of long nights and take out and Stiles' breathless laugh, his steady hands, his fingers under Derek's jaw urging him to _stay still, godammit_ while he curbs the dark grain of his stubble with a new razor, they have Stiles' abandoned piano music, old internalized war mementos, the scars at the small of his back that Derek sewed up in an empty cabin, a picture on the dresser from Laguna beach and in it, they're somewhere off to the side, his mouth moving red and slow and tender saying, _Derek, Derek_.

-

Even with Stiles here, he dreams.

“We’re gonna do so much shoveling,” the illusion tells him with rosy cheeks and a flushed voice. He’s got his head tilted back, up and up until there’s nothing in his line of vision but the snow falling.

Derek wraps an arm around his waist, says, “It’s freezing out here and you’re scaring the neighbors.”

“Mm, tell them they can shove it. The batman boxers stay."

“Yeah?” He slides his mouth down the line of a bare shoulder, laps at the bud of a collarbone. “Do I get to stay, too?”

“Quit fishing,” Stiles says, moving his neck in little asking movements. Derek pictures his face, the small smile, the flash pink tongue between white teeth, straight and blunt. His hands are a pair of shortbread cookies crumbling on Derek’s skin. He’s joking, “You are mine in all the creepy ways you wanna be.”

(The parts of him that are all his mother say, yes, and yes and yes.)

-

“Hey,” Stiles’ hand is on his shoulder, a pale white blur in the dark. The quilt is tied around the front of his chest, knot held loose on his sternum. “Get up. It’s snowing, I wanna see it.”

Derek makes a sleepy sound but drags himself off the couch. He lets Stiles guide him toward the balcony. “It snows all the time. Didn’t you come here to sleep?”

“First of the year. It’s special.” Stiles says. His voice goes soft, wistful, “better than the shit dreams I was having, anyway.” Something in Derek goes hard and he thinks of the harsh smell of him under all the superficial stuff, thinks, _let him have this one_.

His feet are bare and skinny. His body against the falling, all white, something out of a holiday poster. There are two adirondack chairs outside covered in wet ice. When he looks back at Derek, his eyes are harder than they were before.

“I saved your life,” Stiles says, the words Derek could never get his mouth around. His face is an open wound. “I want to stop fucking dreaming about you.”

“I’m - sorry.” He says, he doesn’t know what else there is, he doesn’t -

Stiles’ voice goes quiet, “Stop that. You know that I would’ve - even if we weren’t but,” he has both his hands in his hair, behind the pink of his ears. “I need you to tell me if you want me, too, because if you don’t, if I keep waking up - with this feeling, then I’m going to go crazy. You’re going to drive me crazy.”

“You’re eighteen,” Derek sighs, but shuffles closer, like he’s tired of fighting, he _is_ , he’s tired, “You’re going to college. This isn’t what you need.”

“Fuck you,” Stiles says. He presses his thumb into the center curve of Derek’s bottom lip before he leans in and kisses him.

-

**12:15 am**

“This is really lame, you know.” Stiles tells him.  

Derek smiles into the small soft of his throat, says, “ _You’re_ really lame.”

“When I said I wanted to christen the new apartment, this isn’t exactly what I meant.”

“Do you think with anything but your dick ever.”

Stiles gives him a cheeky grin, squeezes him around the shoulders, sways their hips into each other like bumper cars. He leans in, mouth soft and warm against his ear, whispers, “We are gonna do it _so_ hard in every. Single. Room.”

“ _Stiles_ ,” Derek pulls back, looks him in the eyes. He feels Stiles’ heart in his heart, the pulsing easy beat. There’s two bowls of cereal getting soggy on the kitchen table. Frank Sinatra sings in a white room, just like before, but it’s real and alive and under his fingers. He traces a hand over Stiles’ mouth. The words tighten his throat. “I’m.”

 _I’m falling in love with you_ , or _I want you anyway_ , or _I need you to keep saving my ass_.  

“I know, Derek,” Stiles kisses his palm reverently. His eyes are full and swollen with warmth. “It’s okay, I know.”

**Author's Note:**

> I'm a fool for that shake in your thighs  
> I'm a fool for that sound in your sighs  
> I'm a fool for your barely  
> I'm a fool for your love.
> 
> \- Rhye, Open


End file.
